6
2015
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
number 24
North Carolina Literature in a Global Context: Writing Beyond the State’s Borders by Margaret D. Bauer, Editor Regular readers of NCLR may recall that we introduced the 2015 special feature topic, global North Carolina literature, at the end of our 2014 issue, as part of introducing a short story by Annie Frazier, a writer originally from North Carolina, who lives in Florida, but set her story in Japan. With the goal of inspiring submissions for this special feature section, I proposed a panel on North Carolina literature in a global context for the North Carolina Writers Conference, held in Western North Carolina in July 2014. I included Annie Frazier among the panelists, asking her to share with the audience the interesting story she told me of how she came to write “Sakura” (and to read just enough of it to inspire anyone in the audience who hadn’t yet bought a copy of the 2014 issue to do so). Like Annie, some of the writers included in this section of NCLR Online 2015 have left their native North Carolina to live elsewhere, and like “Sakura,” much of the content of this issue is set beyond the borders of the Old North State, even beyond the US borders. Thanks to Jeff Davis, who recorded the North Carolina Writers Conference panel, our readers can hear Annie’s anecdote, as well as the other panelists, including another writer from a previous issue’s special feature section, Ellyn Bache, who was interviewed for our 2012 issue about the film adaptation of her novel Safe Passages. When I contacted Ellyn Bache about participating on this panel, she jumped right on it, writing back to me, “as a writer who grew up in DC and came to North Carolina for the first time for college, then went north again and returned to the Carolinas before my first novel was published, I’m still not thought of as a Southern writer, even though some of my books are set in North Carolina and even
though I’m convinced that DC when I was growing up was pretty ‘Southern.’” As NCLR editor, I have certainly noted a wide variety of backgrounds of the writers in this state alone, and I have witnessed the “valuable perspective” the outsider brings to “Southern” topics – as Ellyn does, for example, in her Chapel Hill–set novel The Activist’s Daughter. You will find in this special feature section several poems, stories, and numerous reviews of books by writers who, like Ellyn Bache, moved to North Carolina from elsewhere – and some who, again like Ellyn, also moved on to elsewhere after living for a time here. During an email exchange with me last year, Elaine Neil Orr inspired and defined this special feature topic: “‘Global North Carolina’ springs to mind as a category that could include writers . . . who have a deep history in North Carolina but write books largely set somewhere else.” She continued, “With this category, the doors could swing both ways” to include “those who come into North Carolina from elsewhere and write here about North Carolina.” After you’ve enjoyed the content of our online issue, you can look forward to an interview with Elaine Neil Orr conducted by a writer “from elsewhere” who has made North Carolina home for many years now, Kathryn Stripling Byer (who was the honoree of the 2014 North Carolina Writers Conference). This interview is forthcoming in the 2015 print issue. In the meantime, you can listen to Elaine talk about this subject during our North Carolina Writers Conference panel discussion (and you can read in this online issue Tara Powell’s tribute to Kay Byer during the conference banquet). Also on the panel this past summer was Jaki Shelton Green, who has taught across Europe and